A Christmas labor of love
By Joseph Manning
The Christmas season carries with it a nostalgia that is absent from other holiday celebrations.
Most everyone remembers a favorite toy from childhood or a homecoming that made December a perfect month. The same can’t be said for the perfect M-80 explosion on the Fourth of July or the most exciting Detroit Lions game on Thanksgiving. Nostalgia is baked into Christmas’ DNA. There’s the ubiquitous “Old Fashioned Christmas” and songs that look backwards hoping for a white Christmas “just like the ones I used to know.”
Food plays an enormous role in the traditions of Christmas. There are always food offerings that only appear once a year, and we should be grateful that some of those offerings are so rare; fruit cake, figs, burnt almond torte, sugar plums, if that was ever really a thing. But mixed in with the “acquired taste” categories are the traditions that make Christmas Christmas. Milk chocolate in every shape imaginable from angels to Santa Claus. Nut rolls and pizzelles. Legumes of every description. Eggnog and a river of liquor. And growing up with close Italian friends there was always the Christmas Eve feast of the seven fishes.
In my memories of all things Christmas past, the one food staple that defined the season in our home was suet pudding. For those unfamiliar, suet pudding is an Anglo delicacy that, like a great many of my ancestor’s recipes, relied on the consumption of otherwise objectionable animal organs. Think haggis. Suet is the fat from around the kidneys of livestock, usually cows, and is used as a binder to form the pudding into loaves which resembled a meatloaf only with a more disgusting twist.
My mother made this pudding every Christmas of my childhood because my father loved it, and if he ever needed more evidence of my mother’s love and devotion he would be hard pressed to find it. That’s because the making of suet pudding is so labor intensive that it makes beef Wellington look like child’s play.
When Christmas Day approached, my mother would summon me to the kitchen and hand me a dime with instructions to go to the Washington Meat Market on Main Street and ask the butcher for a pound of suet. The butcher would take a huge chunk of solid white fat and wrap it in brown paper, tie it with a string and hand it to me. Upon returning with this rock of corpulence, my mother would attach a meat grinder to the kitchen counter and proceed to grind this gristle into a pebble-like substance which would then be mixed in an enormous pottery bowl along with raisins, currants, brown sugar, flour molasses and the souls of a thousand dead Celtic warriors. From there, this mushy concoction had to be ladled into bleached muslin bags and tied with strips of muslin cloth. The bags would then be lowered into a huge vat of boiling water so that the suet would be boiled out while simultaneously binding the other ingredients into solid loaves. Every step of this process had to be exact or you would end up with a soupy mess that no one would eat no matter how many pints of Guinness you downed.
When it was done right, the muslin bag would be opened following Christmas dinner and reveal an epicurean treasure that was as thick and rich and decadent as Elon Musk’s head. It was sliced and served with a hot, translucent lemony sauce and for that moment made Christmas perfect.
Traditions become traditions for a reason; they comfort us and help to keep an otherwise out of control world in check. I hope that the readers of this essay find comfort and peace in whatever tradition they practice during this magical time of year. Merry Christmas.
Joseph Manning is managing director of Alpha Omega Communications and a former member of Washington City Council.